Gender,Race and Ecotourism Assemblages in Rural Creole Belize

Race and gender intertwine with ecotourism in Belize's northern rural Creole villages, communities that are home to protected areas renowned for birds and other wildlife. Racialising and gendering assemblages found here emerge out of Belize's long history of forest-based slavery economies. From the early days of sport fishing and jaguar hunting in the 1950s through to contemporary bird-and wildlife-watching, tourism has joined these socio-natural formations. Intersectional feminist political ecology and assemblage theory provide an analytical frame that reveals how ecotourism serves to re-entrench gendered and racialised inequality, yet in cases where the ecotourism industry is small-scale and locally owned, possibilitie s for challenging those hierarchies also arise.